Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet

Virtuous men alone possess friends.

What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one

What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on...

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when the man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

Work is often the father of pleasure.

We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly – that is the first law of nature.

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them

When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

Work is the only way to make life bearable

We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world.

What is not in nature can never be true.

When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.

When you were hanged, dissected, stunned with blows and made to row in the galleys, did you always think that everything was for the best in this world?

Would you believe that while the flames were consuming these innocent victims, the inquisitors and the other savages were chanting prayers? These pitiless monsters were invoking the God of mercy...While committing the most atrocious crime.

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

You (Pindar) who possessed the talent of speaking much without saying anything.

We may not always oblige, but we may always speak obligingly